De-mastering Historical Narrative in Robert Yeo's The Eye of History and Kee Thuan Chye's We Could **** You Mr Birch

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The master narratives of History-the offspring of a marriage between colonial modes of control and the Enlightenment view of the inevitable progress of mankind-are included in the major targets of the kind of postmodern thought expressed by Jean-Francois Lyotard who is highly suspicious of any comprehensive system of thought, Carlingian, Hegelian, Marxist, or otherwise. Postcolonial thinking, though divided in all sorts of ways, is relatively unified in agreement with Lyotard's stance. It also calls for the recognition of the open-ended use of historiographical terminology. Such words as "Europe" and "the East" are, after all "hyperreal terms" that "refer to figures of the imagination whose geographical [and historical] referents remain somewhat indeterminate" (Chakrabarty, 1996, p. 233). This paper examines the work of two Southeast Asian dramatists who make their own kind of indeterminate history. Both Robert Yeo in Singapore (The Eye of History, 1992) and Kee Thuan Chye in Malaysia (We Could **** You Mr Birch, 1994) undercut history as master narrative, both in the colonial and postcolonial senses. They also subscribe to the postmodern notion that in history, as in other expressive arts, medium is the message and that any kind of seemingly authoritative voice ought not to go unquestioned.